I will reprint The Washington Post’s lead editorial here nearly in full. I will have comments after, though I will make this one now: every character trait and leadership deficit the Post points to was evident to objective observers—like me—from the beginning of Obama’s administration. That one of the most consistent and prominent Democratic Party and liberal policy boosters in the national news media finally mounts the integrity, honesty and integrity to admit it now is not all that satisfying.

Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) decided he would vote against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, he explained his reasoning in a 1,700-word essay. On balance, he concluded, “the very real risk that Iran will not moderate and will, instead, use the agreement to pursue its nefarious goals is too great.” We disagree with that conclusion, but not with serene confidence; we share the senator’s concern that Iran will use the lifting of sanctions to intensify its toxic behavior in the region. We understand and respect Mr. Schumer’s decision; also, it’s generally better to treat policy disagreements in good faith.

That has not been the spirit in which Mr. Obama and his team have met his Iran-deal critics. The president has countered them with certitude and ad hominem attacks, the combined import of which is that there are no alternatives to his policy, that support for the deal is an obvious call and that nearly anyone who suggests otherwise is motivated by politics or ideology. Mr. Obama’s rhetoric reached its low point when he observed that the deal’s opponents value war over diplomacy and that Iranian extremists were “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”

This was self-contradictory when the president said it; one of the announced GOP opponents, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (Tenn.), is a man Mr. Obama himself praised, just four months ago, as “sincerely concerned about this issue” and “a good and decent man.” The White House lost further consistency after Mr. Schumer’s announcement. If there’s anyone who’s not a Republican partisan, it’s the arch-Democrat from New York, who’s planning a bid to lead the Democratic Senate caucus after the current leader, Harry Reid (Nev.), retires. As payback, the White House and its allies are openly encouraging Democrats to deny him the job.

…[B]y not sticking to the merits of the deal, Mr. Obama implies a lack of confidence in them. The contrast is striking between the president’s tone today and his 2008 speech accepting the Democratic nomination: Looking ahead to debating his GOP opponent, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), he pledged that “what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes, because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and each other’s patriotism.” There’s a sad progression from that aspiration to an approach that is all about winning, even if it has to be winning ugly.

Some observations:

1. As I have noted in previous posts, the Iran deal can’t be defended on the merits, because what we know will happen as a result of it—increased terrorism funded by Iran—is horrible, and what are supposedly its good features are unlikely to come to fruition. It is literally the embodiment of the worst of all rationalizations: #22, “It’s not the worst thing.”

2. It was negotiated from weakness, based on Obama’s open unwillingness to use American military power, with an untrustworthy and hostile partner, by an administration whose judgment in foreign policy had been proven wrong and deadly again and again. As Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, not exactly an anti-Obama zealot, wrote last week:

One obvious lesson is that intelligence on nuclear capabilities is notoriously unreliable. The Iraq war was fought on the basis of “one of the most public — and most damaging — intelligence failures in recent American history,” the Robb-Silberman commission concluded in 2005. On nuclear weapons, the intelligence community regularly has been caught by surprise, in Iran and Iraq but also in North Korea, Pakistan, India and the Soviet Union.Judging by his certitude on the United States’ ability to detect Iranian violations, it’s safe to say that’s not the Iraq war lesson Obama has taken to heart. “If Iran cheats, we can catch them, and we will,” he boasted last week.

No, the lesson Obama has in mind is that war is unpredictable and destructive and should always be a last resort. I agree with that, as, I think, would most critics of the Iran deal, notwithstanding the president’s suggestion that they share “a preference for military action over diplomacy.”

The difficulty is that it is easier in hindsight to label wars as being smart or dumb, of choice or of necessity, than when making policy decisions in the face of many unknowns. Nothing illustrates that better than Obama’s own record.

He waged his own war of choice in Libya, a seven-month air campaign that dislodged dictator Moammar Gaddafi in 2011. Obama then refused to commit U.S. resources to postwar stabilization, with the result that Libya is now fractured in a brutal civil war that has opened havens for Islamist radicals.

He withdrew all U.S. troops from Iraq when it had achieved unity and relative stability, and he denied assistance to moderate pro-democracy forces in Syria when that nation’s dictator turned ferociously on them. The foreseeable, and foreseen, result of both decisions was growing instability and extremism. A malignant terrorist-run state put down roots at the heart of the Middle East.

This has been not only a humanitarian calamity, something Obama’s foreign-policy team considered intolerable when depredation on a similar scale was taking place in Darfur during a different presidency, but also a strategic disaster, as judged by Obama’s own metrics. He has been forced to return thousands of troops to Iraq, to conduct thousands of bombing sorties over Iraq and Syria — in short, to favor military action over diplomacy, and from a position of no-good-option weakness.

This is the leader whom we are being asked to trust, and that Israel is being told has its best interests at heart.

3. The arguments in favor of the deal by Obama’s knee-jerk peanut gallery in the pundit world, in contrast, don’t pass the giggle test. Here is perpetually submissive E.J. Dionne, who never saw the results of an Obama decision that he couldn’t find reason to cheer:

The president was not wrong when he said that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.”

E. J. somehow omits the interesting fact that the negotiator of the Iran deal also argued for the war in Iraq, and before the Bush Administration did…John Kerry. No, Obama wasn’t wrong…he was deceptive and misleading. As usual.

4. Is Obama the biggest narcissist we have ever had in the White House? I am beginning to think so. If not, at least the other narcissists were competent….well, more competent.

5. I just re-read the earlier Ethics Alarms posts on the Iran deal. The comparison with Munich and Chamberlain remains fair, apt and obvious, and the only new developments have cast more doubts on the wisdom of the deal, not fewer. Arrogant incompetence is the defining characteristic of this President and his administration, and no objective observer could reach any other conclusion. This may be the most tragic example yet.

4. Is Obama the biggest narcissist we have ever had in the White House? I am beginning to think so. If not, at least the other narcissists were competent….well, more competent.

Who can compare to president Obama? Bill Clinton is the only one that comes immediately to mind. As to which brand of narcissism is more destructive, well, I can’t really say. I guess the jury is still out on Obama, at least. But if this deal goes through, and the results are as they are almost certain to be, history should probably judge him as the biggest, or at least the most destructive.

The WaPo lament about Obama’s change to seeing every disagreement as partisan and unprincipled (dare I add, “racist?”) is about six years too late. As such, it doesn’t even register a positive on my radar screen — merely a lower than usual negative reading. They’re still sycophants, they just can’t bring themselves to be as casually sycophantic as the New York Times, Dionne or Paul Krugman by excusing such nakedly disgusting rhetoric as Obama employed in his American University speech.

“Remember, what I said was, that, it’s the hard-liners in Iran who are most opposed to this deal,” Obama said in the interview, conducted last week but released Monday. “And I said, in that sense, they’re making common cause with those who are opposed to this deal here. I didn’t say that they were equivalent.”

Thank goodness. I must have missed the “in that sense” qualifier in his original speech. Oh, wait…

In fact, it’s those hardliners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hardliners chanting “Death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican Caucus.

Stupid WaPo transcription. They omitted “in that sense” too. Must be some GOP or Netanyahu plot. Probably both.

Just as an aside, when did the Iranian president and Ayatollah, who approved the deal, become moderates. For some bizarre, apparently misinformed reason, I always thought they were the hardliners.

Oh, the Post obviously hates having to go as far as it does, and it bends over backwards to use weasel words and say “it can understand” why Obama’s acting like a junior high school student, but this is still a very tough attack. Can you imagine the negotiations and compromises that produced this piece?

Well put. The Post, as with many other news services, must now deal with the consequences of having sold their remaining credibility into unyielding support for the Obama agenda. Now, they’re faced with the breaking point. Unable to ignore it any further, they must seize upon Schumer’s defection over the Iran deal fiasco as an excuse for criticizing the Annointed One. Even then, they must parse their words to retain their Ideological Purity! However, in making that journey from factfinder to political cheerleader, they’re now discovering that there’s no way back. They’ve dug their own journalistic graves and the undertaker is shoveling in the dirt. They can only attempt to throw some of the dirt out by hand, but they’re only staving off the inevitable burial.

I finally had to stop reading the really idiotic comments on a message board called .straightdope.com, which somehow consists entirely of people who can’t figure out why, for example, irrational rationalizations are not consistent with each other How can there be both a rationalization about arguing that if something is legal, it must be ethical, and one that says violating a stupid law is ethical, one critic writes. Another genius wonders, “What’s the deal with the background?” Yeah, why would a blog called “Ethics Alarms” reference the Iran deal? The most infuriating discussions of the posts here are on other forums.

I have a rule: if your site takes me more than three tries to register, it’s not worth it. They flunked. Stupid “type the word s t r a i g h t without spaces”..oh, eat me. This crap PLUS the blurry numbers and letters? To hell with them.

The Iran situation is an example to this observer for the implementation of Realpolitik. Forget debate, morals, ethics or political philosophy. There is only one guaranteed method of removing the potential threat.

Well, I think it’s more nuanced than that. Realpolitik or what could simply be called global competition, which is just a subset of *survival* doesn’t require throwing out ethics. It does require a different set of ethics.

Before a community can have an advanced set of ethics for it’s members, it first has to be secure and survive. Which means that there has to be a whole set of ethics governing that survival and security *external* to the set of ethics between members.

Now that is no license for all manner of atrocity, as that “external” set of “survival-oriented” ethics would still have limitations placed on it, but it doesn’t necessarily look like the set of ethics between members.